Wish this were in a git repository.

Your wish is my command:

https://github.com/chalst/pollockhostsfork

I'll see how good I am about updating this: there seem to be 2-4 changes most weeks.

Postscript - I've emailed Dan Pollock to see if he thinks this git repo is worthwhile. There is already a version of the file on Github at https://gist.github.com/399642, but it is not updated and is a year and a half old.

That's awesome.

So could I get a little more detail here about why git is important? Are you making a init script to pull the file directly into /etc/hosts at boot (or at an interval)?

Well, it's a little bit of work.

The point is that several people can maintain their own branches of /etc/hosts and use git to keep them up to date and propagate their additions.

I'd just clobber /etc/hosts from the repo file with cp -f, whenever the repo is changed, no need for any cron/init automation.

awesome, I saw this original article the other day, and thought it'd be awesome if it was on github (didn't think to, as it wasn't my work..) I was curious about how often it was updated, seems i've got an answer.

Just out of curiosity, how does one go about figuring out what sites to block and keeping this up to date and relevant? That would seem like a lot of effort?

I added a few things to my hosts file for ad-blocking (doubleclick, etc), and Chrome has since started behaving oddly... The back button reloading the same page and adding another history element, etc.

Maybe due to javascript trying to call things that don't exist? Not sure. Just be aware that hosts blocking can cause odd page results on occasion, because of content fetch failures (as apposed to noscript/adblock which often stop the request from even happening).